Reading on Labour Day

 

People keep asking how my retreat was. No-one wants to believe that I was on holiday at a monastery!

(“That’s a bit weird,” one young parishioner said.)

But I very much enjoy my visits to Mount Angel Abbey, and every year I learn something new that gets me thinking about about parish life.

This year, I was struck by how important reading is to the life of the monk. As you probably know, Benedictines eat in silence—more precisely, they eat while listening to books.

At lunch and supper they hear the Bible, St. Benedict’s Rule, and some other book chosen by the abbot. During my visit last month, Abbot Jeremy Driscoll asked if I would like to see the list of books the monks have heard in the last few years, and I accepted eagerly.

It was an eye-opener! I could hardly believe so much material could be covered in a year, nor the range of books and topics.

This led me to wonder: do Catholics hear too much preaching, and too little reading?

Now this thought is still half-baked. The homily, as you know, is a very important part of the Mass, and you’d get bored pretty quickly if I just opened a book and read from it after the Gospel. After all, the monks are multi-tasking—listening to the book and eating their meal.

Still, today I would like to experiment a bit by doing some reading connected to tomorrow, Labour Day. Work is such an important topic that it deserves more thought than we usually give it, and I think I’ve found something that might help us connect this secular holiday to our spiritual journey.

What I want to read comes from a book called The Benedictine Handbook and is inspired, of course, by St. Benedict’s Rule.

        What sort of things do we think are holy?

The question seems silly and easy to answer at first. God is holy, so whatever is to do with God is holy too. This leads us very naturally to think about prayer, going to church, acting justly and other spiritual things.

All of these are holy and worthwhile, but if we concentrate on them alone, we miss out some very large parts of our lives. Most people spend much of their time working for their living, and working for and within their families. Our daily lives often seem to have nothing holy about them at all. This is a thoroughly un-Christian way of looking at things and the Rule of St Benedict provides something of an antidote.

Work is not simply … another good monastic practice… there is something about it which sums up the goals of monastic, and hence of Christian life.

At this point, you may be wondering what a sixth-century saint has to tell modern men and women about their work? Let’s read on… the author applies the Rule’s insights to our own situation in the world. 

Today there is a large degree of confusion about the purpose and value of work. There are two opposing tendencies, which to some degree are present in everyone.

One is to minimize work as much as possible, ‘clocking’ on and off, with little regard for what is done in between or the sense of purpose in it. The other is the workaholic, who cannot stop, who stays late at work, or even brings it home at weekends. Work becomes a person’s life.

Many people feel alienated from their work. While some individuals have work which is fulfilling, many more feel no connection with the actual work they do and drudge away at something whose only direct bearing on their lives is that it provides them, if they are lucky, with the means to survive and perhaps raise children.

Others feel alienated because the process of working for gain can itself be dehumanizing. People who do rotten jobs, or none at all, are easily seen as inferior, and easily see themselves as inferior.

There is also a third level of alienation… It is a curious phenomenon of social history that at some point work became something one went out to do. We talk of domestic work, but it is not seen in the same way as, say, ploughing a field or brokering a deal. The trouble with this division is that we end up with a very artificial conception of what work is. It is seen as something which earns money from ‘outside’ and is judged by what it brings in…

The worker is also judged in the same way. The focus is on what is done and for whom. We have to look instead at who is doing it.

If we wish to arrive at a Christian understanding of work, we have to begin with the basic facts of the faith. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Everything is changed by this, including our work. …

To get the right view of work, we have to get the right view of humanity. Instead of valuing certain types of work above others, we should think that each is being done by a human being, created and loved by God.

The incarnation of the Word has given us a gospel of work, the first tenet of which is that work has value precisely because it is done by human beings.

Whatever we do in our God-given capacity for action can be grace-bearing since we may do it as human beings fully restored to the full image of God who took on our nature. Perhaps this seems too grand a vision of the daily round of the office [or school or home] or factory, but we must bear in mind who is doing that daily grind: a human person made in the image of God.

At this point our reading echoes today’s Gospel, where we heard Jesus say “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

“Work we are reluctant to do, or the unwelcome idleness of unemployment, is part of what God has taken to himself on the cross. Idleness is the enemy of the soul because it springs from the conviction that God is not found in those things that bore or hurt us.”

But he is. And so everyone in our parish is called to work. Circumstances call some to the work of prayer from a care facility, others to leadership of major enterprises, still others to the classroom, and others to the care of the home.

Our reading concludes: “[All] work, whether it be designing planes or washing dishes, is part of [what St. Benedict calls] the “labour of obedience” which brings us back to God.”

Happy Labour Day!

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The Benedictine Handbook is published by Liturgical Press. The article on “Work” quoted above is by Laurence McTaggart.